In the outdoors, many modern conveniences are left behind. Backyard enthusiasts, tailgaters, and anybody in need of a portable heating source must plan accordingly, bringing equipment as well as a source of power or fuel. For example, conventional portable cookers can be electric, gas, or charcoal powered. While each variety is useful, electric grills require electric outlets, which seriously hinder their portability. Portable gas grills typically require compressed propane tanks, which come from a finite resource, can pose a fire hazard and are usually disposable thereby generating waste. Charcoal grills require charcoal briquettes, which are dirty, bulky, and are difficult and dangerous to dispose of after use. These grills are often bulky and take lengthy times to preheat, as well as cool down after use. Some of these drawbacks have been overcome by solar powered cookers.
Solar cookers are advantageous over conventional cookers because they are fueled solely by sunlight, without the use of traditional fuels. Moreover, solar cookers do not produce any smoke. Therefore, they do not contribute health-damaging pollutants or waste associated with cookers needing carbon-based fuels. Nevertheless, known solar cookers fail to work as intended because they need to be large, they are inefficient, and they are difficult to operate. For these reasons, no solar cooker has succeeded in achieving widespread use.
There are several recognizable solar cookers in the art. While, under desirable conditions, they all are capable of generating heat to cook, these cookers all have substantial shortcomings. For example, concentrating cookers are disadvantageous because they possess no means to minimize heat loss; they are large and awkward to operate; they reflect light at the operator and, therefore, require eye shielding to use; and they are messy, as drippings fall freely onto the reflector.
Box cookers are insulated. However, they can only achieve temperatures of about 300° F. because most of the heat escapes through a glass panel. These devices are typically bulky, heavy, slow to cook, and fragile.
The solar panel cooker is another example of a large and awkward apparatus. It is also disadvantageous because it takes a long time to generate low heat levels. The panel cooker is a variation of the above-mentioned concentrator. It follows that this cooker is inefficient because, like the concentrating cooker, it also lacks any means to store or trap heat energy.
There is a clear need to improve the concentration of solar energy to increase the thermal energy available to cook. Also, there is a need to retain that thermal energy by means of insulation. A disadvantage of a conventional parabolic reflector, such as the reflector described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,002,499, is that the solar energy is concentrated in a very small area, too small to be desirable for most cooking purposes. Moreover, the image area moves too quickly across the cooking container, unless the parabola is adjusted frequently. The present invention provides an improvement over known solar cookers by utilizing a non-imaging reflector that strikes a larger area relative to conventional parabolic reflectors, thereby increasing solar energy capture, and incorporating a non-tracking capability for ease of use. It remains that there are no known solar cookers that have the portability of conventional cookers and are able to generate sufficient heat to accomplish heating tasks, such as cooking, roasting, searing, baking, vaporizing, or frying, in a reasonable time. There is a need for an improved efficient working portable solar cooker.
The present invention shows superior performance in a wide range of heating applications such as: cooking, roasting, searing, baking, sterilizing, boiling, dehydrating, steeping, vaporizing, smoking, and frying.